How’d I Do?

This is just a writing exercise. I’ve been needing badly to polish myself, does anyone have any commentary? Hit the jump for the full piece I previewed yesterday.

I’m in the Ale & Witch, a craft beer and wine pub that involves a sweaty and couch-filled bar room and a courtyard in the middle of some deflated office building or luxury condos. Since I’m bereft of good planning, I’m writing this on the inside of the cover of the book I’m reading (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) while texting my friend in some sort of panic about sitting alone with a beer and a book. Oh, just now I’ve become existentially locked inside due to torrential mid-afternoon Florida rain. This takes place after maneuvering inside the poorly ventilated craft bar after making the laudable decision to not expose my cell phone and analog paperback book to threatening celestial spitting and the distant belch of thunder. Looking around I notice first to my immediate left has recently sat a mid-40s interracial couple (of the fit black, with endless posture of cool, male and sodden gravitationally-deflated female [why this functions as a type, yours truly can only speculate]) and they’ve just set there on the lavishly cushioned (for a bar) L-shape couch that we both share for maybe 10 minutes in that specific way that only mid 40s interracial couples can sit without talking for minutes but not venting any sense of rage or buried animosity. Of course, the second my ass leaves the couch to get a pen to write what seemed like a desperately important situational essay on said powerfully silent biracial couple, the Mid-40s IC starts gabbing in monosyllabic sputters of possibly more seismic interest. Though, perhaps even more ominous, when I return some particularly spacey Pink Floyd song hums out of the Muzak and the endlessly cool black male taps out every 2nd and 4th note in that way that only black people keep time – in complete rejection of the authoritarian white way of keeping time by hitting every 1st and 3rd note. This breaks his stream of endless cool because unfortunately Pink Floyd does not keep time the way he thinks they do.

Next to me on the right is a young family and maybe someone’s sister-in-law because three ostensibly related toddler girls are hovering around an iPad on a kickstand of such complexity that it defeats the purpose of a tablet, I think. No fault of the kids that they have fashionable parents. Who could dream of having such liberal parents to bring their, for all anyone knows, three-year-old twin girls into a craft beer bar on a Sunday evening. I am by no means casting judgment on the escapism of parents of young children or the potential for substance dependence here. Clearly, I am in no position for either. And look how angelic and liberal the parents are as the youngest girl comes up to me to say “Hi!” in full cherubic, chubby-jointed and OshKosh B’Gosh Overall’d fashion before pointing off-balance at her parents as they simultaneously beckon her away from the creep pretending to read while casting sideways and drunkenly long glances around the room.

It appears the mom of the girls or hey now, the sister-in-law’s hubby is here, but, anyways, the mom is at another young couple’s table. This YC of the hipster and full sleeve tattoos for both, fashionable headwear and deliberately purchased distressed and cut up jeans. I quickly become convinced the Sun Dress-wearing mom is visiting this YC’s table as a totemic reminder to use Birth Control – because as young mom’s do, she can’t not talk about her three daughters. “And yes, they do a lot of damage on the way out. Look at this lavender colored sundress. See the frilly bottom, if you imagine it as a comically large female opening you wouldn’t be far off. Neither in its bruise-like color or comic largeness.” And the Hipster YC recoils politely into their beers, male crossing his legs in that feminine way thick-rimmed spectacled hipsters are wont to do, the female spreading hers – possibly to verify that she doesn’t have her own private weather system functioning in the cavern of her nethers.

But no, the mom’s talking to the hipster, be-hatted and fully tattooed and pierced parents of the oldest girl of the toddlers. Who – now that I think of it – definitely doesn’t resemble the fitter and cuter children of the sundress mom. The older progeny of the fashionable hipsters, has her very own trendy headwear and kid clothes. She also sports the not quite angelic anymore chub of very laissez-faire parents. Now that I think about it, this kind of deflates my whole B.C. reinforcing theory and probably the whole purpose of writing this setting piece.